[lug] vi editor

[Tkil]

[apologies if this reply is woefully out of date, but i just got back
into town ... and someone mentioning emacs and perl in the same
message was just more than i could resist.  ;->]

>>>>> "Archer" == Archer Sully <archer at meer.net> writes:

Archer> Emacs is kinda like PERL.  

heh.  :)

Archer> That's actually very typical usage for a veteran vi user.  The
Archer> power of the editor is really in its ability to combine
Archer> movement and editing commands.

and, in this case, the ability to use the "external" unix toolkit to
accomplish editor tasks.  to lengthen your analogy above, vi is to
emacs as shell is to perl -- vi and shell are both very external-
component based, while emacs and perl tend to assimilate and provide
the features "natively", for various reasons.

Archer> And the "." command is helpful, too.  Emacs can't do that
Archer> trick.

well, there are keyboard macros which can do almost the same thing,
but you have to think about it beforehand.  this works with the fact
that vi is very modal, while emacs isn't -- and while '.' is very
nifty, i often end up using it just to avoid the extra keystrokes
involved with switching in and out of insert or replace mode.  (also,
emacs' query-replac-e(regexp)? functions tend to cover much of my use
of '.'.

t.